She thought for a moment. “Vogel,” she radioed. “I need you to come back in and make a bomb.”
“Um. Again, please, Commander?” Vogel replied.
“A bomb,” Lewis confirmed. “You’re a chemist. Can you make a bomb out of stuff on board?”
“Ja,” Vogel said. “We have flammables and pure oxygen.”
“Sounds good.” Lewis said.
“It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft,” Vogel said pragmatically.
“So make it small,” Lewis said. “It just needs to poke a hole in the inner airlock door. Any hole will do. If it blows the door off that’s fine. If it doesn’t, the air will get out slower, but for longer. The momentum change is the same and we’ll get the acceleration we need.”
“Pressurizing Airlock-2,” Vogel reported. “How will we activate this bomb?”
“Johanssen?” Lewis said.
“Uh…” Johanssen said. She picked up her headset and quickly put it on. “Vogel, can you run wires in to it?”
“Ja,” Vogel said. “I will use threaded stopper with a small hole for the wires. It will have little effect on the seal.”
“We could run the wire to lighting panel 41,” Johanssen said. “It’s next to the airlock, and I can turn it on and off from here.”
“There’s our remote trigger,” Lewis said. “Johanssen go set up the lighting panel. Vogel, get in here and make the bomb. Martinez, go close and seal the doors to the reactor room.”
“Yes Commander,” Johanssen said, kicking off her seat toward the hallway.
“Commander,” Martinez said, pausing at the exit, “You want me to bring back some space suits?”
“No point,” Lewis said. “If the seal on the bridge doesn’t hold we’ll get sucked out at close to the speed of sound. We’ll be jelly with or without suits on.”
“Roger, Commander.”
“Are you back in yet, Vogel?” Lewis asked.
“I am just re-entering now, Commander.”
“Beck,” Lewis said to her headset. “I’ll need you back in, too. But don’t take your suit off.”
“Ok,” Beck said. “Why?”
“We’re going to have to literally blow up one of the doors,” Lewis explained. “I’d rather we kill the inner one. I want the outer door unharmed so we keep our smooth aerobraking shape.”
“Makes sense.” Beck responded as he floated back in to the ship.
“One problem,” Lewis said. “I want the outer door locked in the fully open position with the mechanical stopper in place to keep it from being trashed by the decompress.”
“You have to have someone in the airlock to do that,” Beck said. “And you can’t open the inner door if the outer door is locked open.”
“Right,” Lewis said. “I need you to go to the VAL, depressurize, and lock the outer door open. Then you’ll need to crawl along the hull to get back to Airlock 2.”
“Copy, Commander,” Beck said. “There are latch points all over the hull. I’ll move my tether along, mountain climber style.”
“Get to it,” Lewis said. “And Vogel, you’re in a hurry. You have to make the bomb, set it up, get back to Airlock 2, suit up, depressurize it, and open the outer door so Beck can get in.”
“He’s taking his suit off right now and can’t reply,” Beck reported, “but he heard the order.”
“Watney, how you doing?” Lewis’s voice said in his ear.
“Fine so far, Commander,” Watney replied. “You mentioned a plan?”
“Affirmative,” she said. “We’re going to vent atmosphere to get thrust.”
“How?”
“We’re going to blow a hole in the VAL.”
“What!?” Watney said. “How!?”
“Vogel’s making a bomb.”
“I
“That’s too risky and you know it,” she replied.
“Thing is,” Watney said, “I’m selfish. I want the memorials back home to be just for me. I don’t want the rest of you losers in them. I can’t let you guys blow the VAL.”
“Oh,” Lewis said. “Well if you won’t let us then- wait… wait a minute… I’m looking at my shoulder patch and it turns out I’m
“Smart-ass.”
Being a chemist, Vogel knew how to make a bomb. In fact, much of his training was to avoid making them by mistake.
The ship had few flammables aboard, due to the fatal danger of fire. But food, by its very nature, contained flammable hydrocarbons. Lacking time to sit down and do the math, he estimated.
Sugar has 4000 food-calories per kilogram. One food-calorie is 4184 Joules. Sugar in zero-g will float and the grains will separate, maximizing surface area. In a pure oxygen environment, 16.7 million Joules will be released for every kilogram of sugar used, releasing the explosive force of 8 sticks of dynamite. Such is the nature of combustion in pure oxygen.
Vogel measured the sugar carefully. He poured it into the strongest container he could find, a thick glass beaker. The strength of the container was as important as the explosive. A weak container would simply cause a fireball without much concussive force. A strong container, however, would contain the pressure until it reached trus destructive potential.
He quickly drilled a hole in the stopper, then stripped a section of wire. He ran the wire through the hole.
“Sehr gefahrlich,” he mumbled as he poured liquid oxygen from the ship’s supply in to the container, then quickly screwed the stopper on. In just a few minutes, he had made a rudimentary pipe bomb.
“Sehr,
He floated out of the lab and made his way toward the nose of the ship.
Johanssen worked on the lighting panel as Beck floated toward the airlock.
She grabbed his arm. “Be careful crawling along the hull.”
He turned to face her. “Be careful setting up the bomb.”
She kissed his faceplate then looked away, embarrassed. “That was stupid. Don’t tell anyone I did that.”
“Don’t tell anyone I liked it,” Beck smiled.
He entered the airlock and sealed the inner door. After depressurizing, he opened the outer door and locked it in place. Grabbing a handrail on the hull, he pulled himself out.
Johanssen watched until he was no longer in view, then returned to the lighting panel. She had deactivated it earlier from her workstation. Pulling a length of the cable out and stripping the ends, she fiddled with a roll of electrical tape until Vogel arrived.
He showed up just a minute later, carefully floating down the hall with the bomb held in both hands.
“I have used a single wire for igniting,” he explained. “I did not want to risk two wires for a spark. It would be dangerous to us if we had static while setting up.”
“How do we set it off?” Johanssen said.
“The wire must reach a high temperature. If you short power through it, that will be sufficient.”
“I’ll have to pin the breaker,” Johanssen said, “but it’ll work.”
She twisted the lighting wires to the bomb’s and taped them off.
“Excuse me,” Vogel said. “I have to return to Airlock 2 to let Dr. Beck back in.”
“Mm,” Johanssen said.
